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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I previously posted about Patient Recruitment & EHR where I talked about some of the intricacies of patient recruitment and use of EHR for clinical study patient recruitment. While I’m certain that EHR will be a major player in the patient recruitment of the future, I saw a tweet today that made a great case for social media being the go to platform for patient recruitment today.

70% of patients were recruited on Facebook. That number hit me when I saw it. Although, after thinking about it a little bit it makes a lot of sense. The real key to Facebook recruitment is that they know a lot of information about you which advertisers can use to target their ads. So, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to work for patient recruitment.

I think we’ll see other social media channels prove beneficial to patient recruitment as well. Although, it’s still early for many of the other platforms that I think will prove most valuable. Keep an eye on Twitter to start. Also, don’t underestimate the power of mobile apps and even a physician’s social media presence.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

For some reason I’ve been recently talking and reading more and more about patient recruitment. I’ve been fascinated by the creative ways that those doing the clinical studies use to be able to recruit patients that fit the very specific needs of most clinical studies. Plus, I’ve been amazed at how much money is required to be able to recruit patients for these studies.

There’s so many interesting quirks involved in the whole patient recruitment business. In most cases, it’s very large companies trying to recruit individual patients. Many of the chronic patients want to know about and be involved in the clinical study. In many cases, it can lead to a great mutually beneficial outcome for both the company that’s doing the clinical study and the patient who receives care that they wouldn’t have otherwise received. Of course, there are A LOT more intricacies involved in patient recruitment, but those are a few of them.

The biggest challenge with patient recruitment is usually finding the right patients for the clinical study. I think we’re on the brink of technology largely solving this problem for clinical researchers.

EHR Software for Patient Recruitment
When you think about the volume of data that’s going into an EHR system, you can see how valuable the granular EHR data could be in identifying which patients are eligible for a certain clinical study. Certainly there are plenty of nuances to when and how you can use this information. I won’t get into those in this post, but I think it’s quite clear that EHR software will be essential to patient recruitment in clinical studies.

I’m sure that some won’t like to hear this. My first response is that this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, if done right it can be a great thing. We just need to be involved in the discussion so that patient recruitment with EHR software is done the right way. My second response is that this is going to happen whether people like it or not. Instead of trying to stop it, we should focus on how to make it work well for everyone.

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